Sustainable intensification of crop-livestock systems to improve food security and farm income diversification in the Ethiopian highlands
Project Design Workshop
30 January - 2 February 2012, Addis Ababa Ethiopia

Feedback on site selection (from day 3)

This workshop provides an opportunity for a broad group of important stakeholders to both learn about the project plans and to share their views on expectations from and opportunities for synergies with the project (days 1 and 2) and for the core project team to finalize the project details (days 3 and 4).

Presentation by David:

  • Rough delineation;
  • ??
  • Sites that came up: Debre Birhan, Sinana, Jimma, Areka. They are on the gradients (high-high / low-low) that we discussed yesterday. 3 of them are in the high potential / accessible sites, one (DB) is in the arid/accessible. Sinana is an AGP woreda.
  • Site selectiono working group:
    • National dev priorities (MoA?)
    • National research priorities (EIAR?)
    • Livestock, crop, NRM, tree, water specialists;
    • USAid reps
    • Tech support
  • Can wee agree membership process and ???
  • Longer term process explained before in this workshop (analytical approach);

Comments:
  • Nobody has identified the criteria as longer term;
  • Areka is not the most relevant area for this type of crop;
  • Why do we say we select AGP woredas and we have others far from AGP?
  • Having a starting site so far from each other, is that a good idea? If we want to start quickly and bring people together and introduce our basket of opportunities, it will be a challenge to work in such a scattered way.
  • Areka is a centre closed to Hadiya plain which has a mandate to do research - we should move it to Hadiya;
  • Why have we moved from the idea of 4 AGP sites;
  • Areka is a weird choice?
  • What is the population density for these woredas?
  • How about Debre Birhan?
  • East Gojam and Jimma are different;
Feedback on the comments:
  • We looked at wheat zone, AGP, strata etc. and we had one EIAR rep to select those areas;
  • We might want to collect more info. The best advice we have was to extract relevant info from the group but we need broader views;
  • This selection is our quick win selection. At the end of today it would be great to get to 2 sites from this list and perhaps 1-2 other sites to start with.
  • It might be useful to step back, consider money and select a min-max number of sites that we can sustain in the short run. If 3, from our quick start-up process we may not select these 3 but perhaps just one. Better focus on 1-2 sites for the coming 8 months.